Auditor, Bremerton City Council posture for progress

BREMERTON - A proposal that would’ve made Bremerton’s city auditor accountable to the city council won’t go to voters, but reforms to the way the council and auditor work together appear to be gaining momentum.

Gary Nystul, the city’s auditor for the last decade, recently began circulating a document showing the 110 recommendations he’s made in audits over the past five years and whether the city implemented them.

He’s begun meeting with Mayor Patty Lent and is due to meet with City Council President Greg Wheeler to discuss ways in which his work — investigating for fraud, waste and abuse in the city — can get a proper airing. Suggestions include having Nystul present his three to six audit reports a year at council meetings and, more controversially, opening up the closed-door meetings with the audit committee that oversees Nystul.

Wheeler hopes the efforts will help to bring the auditor “into the fold” following a questioning of the position by several council members earlier this year.

In Washington’s cities, only Seattle also has an independent auditor. Earlier this year, City Councilman Jim McDonald began to openly question a position that has cost $650,000 in the almost four years he’s been on the council, especially during tough financial times.

But the auditor’s position is enmeshed in the city’s charter as an independent voice subject to an audit committee — not to the mayor or the council. McDonald and others pushed to ask voters if the position should be accountable to the council, but the proposal failed in June on a 5-4 vote. There was broad agreement, however, that the process of what gets audited in the city, and what happens with the results of those audits, could be improved.

Nystul’s recent release of the five-year summary of audits puts his work — and whether the city followed through on his recommendations — on the table, said City Councilman Eric Younger.

“It’s a wake-up call for the auditor position to prove its merit,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Younger serves on the audit committee, a group that includes two other council members, two residents and a certified public accountant, per the directive of the city charter. They alone have the power to hire and fire the city auditor.

Among the recommendations Nystul listed that weren’t implemented: putting someone in charge of the red-light traffic ticketing program, adopting a city vehicle fleet policy and procedures manual, and periodically reviewing the program that issues cellphone stipends to city workers.

Around a fifth of the recommendations he’s made in the five years were not implemented by the city, according to his research.

Wheeler said the first step at improving the audit release process is to bury the hatchet on the five years’ worth he’s already done. Next is gauging whether the council and administration feel any of the untouched recommendations he’s made are worth implementing.

Younger pointed out that he’s not opposed to leaving some recommendations behind — as long as there’s a reason for doing so.

“Just because the auditor says it doesn’t mean it has to be done,” he said. “Where we have issues is with the response ‘we’re not going to implement it and we won’t tell you why.’”

Once reviews of the former audits are completed, the council will set its sights on the future. Wheeler said he’d like to see the auditor present at council meetings, where the administration, staff and council could discuss the findings.

Nystul is generally supportive of the idea, he said.

“If it’s a format that improves communication, then that ought to be a good thing,” he said.

Wheeler also floated the idea of opening the audit committee to the public. Currently the committee’s meetings, where they discuss what audits to perform and how current inquiries are going, are closed to the public. No meeting minutes kept.

Nystul said that idea is a nonstarter and that opening the meetings would inhibit “a free discussion of ideas.”

“In order to accomplish any reasonable means of discussion, they need to be behind closed doors,” he said.

The city council has yet to set a date to discuss the reforms but will likely do so in the coming weeks, Wheeler said.